The thud of bombs and whistle of bullets barely make the lady flinch, but in “Golda’s Balcony,” it’s a less menacing set of sounds that seem to get under Golda Meir’s skin.

“I can do without that music,” she protests several times in her understated but withering way, cutting off even a Bach cello suite before the strings get a chance to sing.

As portrayed in William Gibson’s affecting and affectionate portrait of Israel’s first female prime minister, now getting a powerful staging at the Old Globe, Meir is conflicted to the core — so unable to reconcile her youthful ideals with the stark reality of fighting a war that something like song seems to her frivolous, an unearned luxury.

And yet there’s a minor-chord majesty to the bravura turn by Tovah Feldshuh as Meir — a sense of her wry subject’s fiery passion that makes the portrayal like a hymn to a hero.

Feldshuh absolutely inhabits the character of the dowdy, chain-smoking Meir, the Russian-born, Milwaukee-bred Israeli patriot whom we meet in a moment of dire crisis, the start of the 1973 Yom Kippur War.

The four-time Tony nominee has had a lot of opportunity to get into this part; Feldshuh originated the role on Broadway in 2003, and “Golda’s Balcony” went on to become the longest-running female solo show in Broadway history (a mark it still holds).

Now in her mid-50s, she has made a second career of portraying a 75-year-old Meir, touring the show widely since the Broadway run.

For Feldshuh, though, the show’s Globe opening is more than just another road date. Feldshuh is a Globe associate artist who appeared in four plays at the theater — then disappeared from its stages, as she stepped back from acting to become a mother.

“Golda’s Balcony” marks her first return to the Balboa Park theater in nearly 30 years, and after multiple curtain calls on opening night she offered from-the-heart remarks about how working here with former artistic director Jack O’Brien and the late founding director Craig Noel helped launch her career.

In so many ways, Feldshuh makes the role of Golda her own, from her distinctive take on Meir’s Midwest-meets-Yiddish accent, to the way she conveys the character’s offhand humor, to the sense of flinty charisma she projects. It’s funny now to think of anyone referring to the Jewish hero David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, by the nickname “BG,” but as Feldshuh makes it clear, Meir didn’t kowtow to anyone.

As directed by Scott Schwartz (who also staged the Globe’s fine recent revival of Neil Simon’s “Lost in Yonkers”), the play flows gracefully between the wartime crisis and Meir’s reflections on how she arrived at that moment.

Images of people from her life are projected on a back screen as they’re weaved into the story: Ben-Gurion, the generals Moshe Dayan and David “Dado” Elazar, Meir’s husband Morris, the then-U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger (of whom Feldshuh does an amusing and accurate impression).